


Summer Skin

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-19
Updated: 2006-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-24 20:26:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for chapter 56.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Skin

The wounds are healing, she feels it in the fever, in the metallic taste in her mouth, how everything is blurred at the edges, like in a dream you are not sure you want to remember. The doctor (he repeats his name kindly, she keeps forgetting) has told her to stay in bed for a bit just yet. But Lan Fan likes the feeling of walls against her back. A wall is a stable thing, real, cool, hard.

The fever tells her she is alive. It reminds her...

(back in Xing, summer and they used to eat ice, Ling would laugh and lay on his back, water running down his chin, sunlight erasing his features, all him made of sunlight, summer, back in Xing, back before all this)

The pain in her arm tells her Ling is still gone.

The ripped and screaming nerve endings mirror Ling´s absence. She thinks of it as one and the same, the constancy of the pain, the silence, the hopelessness. This house is damp, Xing was dry; this house is full of put down photographs, tasteless food, not enough light. Not enough air to breath. It is a closed house.

(Ling loves open spaces, she thinks, he loves the broadest sky and the endless desert, the line of horizon burnt into his skin -into their skin, she was there with him, she remembers, she remembers, another kind of silence altogether, comfortable, fleeting and she, she glowed with him, even behind those dark clothes, behind that mask)

Alphonse helps her getting up. The touch of the armor is cold, not unlike the feeling of leaning against a wall; Alphonse feels constant, real, here, safe from the boundaries of flesh, skin, touch, safe from the frailty she has, Ling has, Edward too, and fragile in his own loneliness. Lan Fan looks at him and she can´t tell if he pities her or feels her pity. Stop looking at me like that, she wants to say. She wants to say...

"I´m going after him, " she says instead, words burning like cold air.

And Alphonse says nothing, nods lightly, he lives in a world of stubborn people.

 _I´m going, I´m going, I´m going_ , it is her job, it is her duty, it´s what she has born for, it´s her life.

The doctor, when she asks his name again, smiles like an old friend whose birthday you have forgotten.

"You shouldn´t move that much just yet," he says, in a voice that carries the witnessing of her breakdown in every letter. "You´re feverish."

 _i know i know i know_ she makes a move for her clothes and wonder how they are going to fit her, what image, what monster she has become, she looks over her shoulder and Knox stares, frowning, Lan Fan wishes she knew how to shrug _don´t look at me like that_. Ling´s message is still in her hand, pressed hard against sweaty palms, ink-poison, language-tatooted by him; i´ve been marked by you since birth, she thinks, even before. You have shaped me.

Knox (maybe she will remember his name this time, maybe it doesn´t matter really, and Lan Fan brushes it off) puts his hand on her forehead, but doesn´t stop her. He has other things to do, for Lan Fan he is a stranger, and he doesn´t know what to make of her. She shies from his touch, looks down.

"Okay," he says, and disapears into the next room.

Lan Fan is barely aware of the girl´s presence.

"She is from Xing," Alphonse points out, a bit unsure, as if he had just insult her.

Yes, of course, Lan Fan sees the black, hair, the round cheeks, those eyes.

(Ling has the same eyes, full of intent, will impossible to break, eyes that at times seemed hollow and at time shimmered with indescribable emotion, and then, how often he closed his eyes and shut you off)

Lan fan takes a step into the room

That girl has the same eyes as Ling. Stubborn, unreadable eyes.

Lan Fan can´t stand to watch her and goes back to the other room, gathers her clothes, her things, she gathers what she remembers of the person she used to be.

Alphonse stands by the doorway as she finishes dressing, doesn´t question her, doesn´t look directly at her.

"That girl," Alphonse says," she recognized Ling. She looked like she had seen him before."

"Many people know him," she replies, so numb she could bite her tongue and not feel a thing. "He is a prince."

( _What?_ Ling asked, out of the blue.

He had his eyes closed, but she was sure the sun was caught up there. Lan Fan was glad she was wearing her mask.

 _How did you know I was looking at you?_

Ling smiled.

It was that summer, back in Xing, endless afternoons, summer skin, the year they ate ice and laughed about it.)

The fever tells her she is alive, but it throws her out if her balance.

Alphonse offers his arm, like before. But this time she doesn´t cling to him, desperate, crying. This time her eyes are dry and she simply leans on him.

"I´m going after him," she repeats.

He nods again, but this time he believes her.


End file.
